


Voice Like Broken Thunder

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Near Death Experiences, Post-Series, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 00:26:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4982734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wrote her obituary once. It was fear that bled from the tip of his pen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Voice Like Broken Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I really don't know. But it's canon-compliant and a weird combination of pre-series canon, headcanon, and a dash of late Season 3. Although I swear, every time I try to write something I had planned my brain throws in some strange unforseen dark horse option to write. And then it happens. Warnings for discussions of death.

He wrote her obituary, once—

_MacKenzie Morgan McHale earned a Peabody award to hold in each hand, and in doing so traded the right to grow old for the chance to report more news in a day than most journalists could aspire to report in their careers. Born in New York City on February 26, 1974, her family soon uprooted for her father’s diplomatic career to seek facts and peace in fragile and volatile corners of the world, engendering an early passion for the facts and even earlier distaste for personal agenda._

_—_ he wrote a few sentences of it and then stared at it, disgusted with himself. Then he tore the piece of paper off his legal pad, crumpled it into a ball, and consigned it to the dark depths a desk drawer.

Every few months he would find a reminder of her: a forgotten camisole, a half-empty bottle of perfume, a tube of lipstick. Then he would think of the piece of paper tucked away in his desk, his fingers longing to smooth it out and take a pen to it, issuing unpublished corrections to the story of the life of the woman who almost stayed.

He wrote her obituary first for the al-Khilani mosque bombing in Baghdad ( _At a young age, she would sit on her father’s knee as he played chess with Soviet diplomats_ , _watching intently as the pieces moved across the polished marble board…_ )then again for a Black Hawk shot down outside Kabul. ( _Before the age of fourteen, she lived in seven different cities in five different countries: New York, DC, Athens, Ankara, East Berlin, Moscow, St. Petersburg…)_ The third time was for a missing AP reporter in Karachi ( _When her father was tasked with overseeing the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1994, MacKenzie was sent to her American godparents in DC, and enrolled in at the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, where she converted to Roman Catholicism, a faith which made her even more an outsider to her wider Protestant political family…_ )and the fourth for a CNN special report from a Taliban compound in the Salar district that made him swallow down vomit, unable to look at the credits to see if MacKenzie was the one who produced it or not.

_Too British to be American and too American to fit in among the student body in Cambridge, she dedicated herself to the ideals of public service, serving three terms in the Student Union culminating with a term as President where she was recognized locally for pro-immigrant and pro-refugee programs. She garnered later note and notoriety for working with a CNN International reporting team producing a series of segments on violence against asylum-seekers in the UK, from which she gained her first producing credits in a long and storied career by providing them with sources and conducting taped interviews with a group of anonymous Afghan students._

It was fear that bled from the tip of his pen.

Fear, in brief illusory moments in deep dark moments of the night. In the space between breaths he knows that all he would have to do is enter her name into a search engine, and then he could place her on a map, draw a straight line between their two dots, and count the miles in finger-lengths and heartbeats and pangs of betrayal. But these brightly shattering moments are not enough to illuminate his heart, instead they shade his instincts with another hue of inaction.

He hated her. Or rather, hated the tangled-up knot of an impression she leaves behind.

American, but with a mouth that wore the wrong accent. Baptized Anglican, but a devout Catholic. The journalist born among cloistered politicians and diplomats, speaking truth out of a world of backroom meetings and whispered chess board negotiations. A studio producer always with a go bag packed and running shoes ready for her feet and a contract no longer than eighteen months. Unafraid of gunfire and explosions, but terrified of jellyfish. Entirely in control of herself and others, until she steps outside of the newsroom. Loving and attentive, until she reveals she’s fucking her ex-boyfriend. Your entire future, until she leaves her key to your apartment behind and flies thousands of miles away.

No one would know what the fuck to make of her, if she died.

Confused and contrary and calculating, MacKenzie Morgan McHale.

Born, February 26, 1974. Died, March 18, 2008. Died, July 1, 2008. Died, January 22, 2009. Died, June 14, 2009. Died, August 6, 2009.

_At the time of the World Trade Center attacks, she was working for CNN International in Berlin as the (then-youngest at the network) senior producer for NewsCenter. For the child of a Cold Warrior, she was in the unique position of being prepared for this brand of psychological trauma. Birthed under a star that warned us of the A bomb, she came of age in a theater of diplomacy that threatened to erupt into war._

_So as the country reeled, MacKenzie McHale pursued a demotion to field producer, returning to her birthplace as the smoke cleared and it was first revealed to us how much the world was about to change. MacKenzie McHale, too, was about to change. She was prepared._

She wanted to go. Even before they met, she wanted to embed. He supposed she was just waiting for their term to be up, and then, impatient, cut it short for her own sake. _I loved her,_ he wanted to write. _I love her. I love her the best, and she hurt me the most._

But he could not write ill of the dead, regardless of the fact that MacKenzie Morgan McHale was still very much _alive._

 

 

 

At the end of three years, she has escaped death either twelve or seventeen times, depending on whether her (the conservative estimate) or Jim Harper’s (the liberal estimate) personal index of their time overseas attests to a higher degree of accuracy.

Answer: neither is truly accurate. Many of their near-death experiences brushed past them without note or notice. The last time in _both_ of their stories, however—

The stabbing has honed itself to live on in its own half-life as the sharpest almost. _  
_

In Will McAvoy’s desk sits a handwritten obituary, some lines slashed out with ink, some lines scratched into and out of and back into existence, and some lines written and retraced in certain emphasis.

Written to near completion, it is four pages long.

 

 

 

_It was during this period that MacKenzie McHale was noted for her excellence by the Columbia Journalism Review, the American Journalism Review. She retired from three long years in the field following a harrowing two weeks in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and joined Starting Point with Will McAvoy in October 2005. It was her first and only newscast where she served as the executive producer. Together, she and McAvoy won two Scripps-Howards, an Emmy, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. In both 2006 and 2007, Starting Point was the runner-up at the Peabody Awards. What they lacked in relative inexperience, they more than made up for with the unquestionable power of their dynamic. Or rather, MacKenzie McHale’s stubborn refusal to allow anything but the unvarnished facts be broadcasted on air and for the first time in her life being in the position to enforce her personal codex of professional ethics. And Will McAvoy, by turn, was more than happy to comply._

_Their time together in the CNN studio was brief, but spectacular._

_She left to embed with the United States Marine Corps shortly after their second Peabody loss. In the next two years, she would win two of her own._

 

 

 

If he takes it out of his desk, he must admit that it exists. So it sits untouched, collecting dust next to a ring entombed in black velvet. _I wrote you into the past,_ he thinks might be an explanation. _I tried to write you into the past._

Even after the ring is removed to her finger, he doesn’t dare touch the yellowed pieces of paper.

Like distrusted charms, he avoids coming into contact with them at all.

They acquire their own superstition—maybe MacKenzie survived the war because he killed her, because he wrote a fragile balance back into the world. His fingers sketch the pink scar on her stomach, and he thinks he didn’t write the night of November 16, 2009. But he wrote so many nights before then. He was prepared, and so the worst did not happen because God wouldn’t have been able to flatten him with the revelation of her death.

For some time, he allows himself to forget about the obituary sitting in his desk.

Later, he thinks that this was what did it.

“Why do you think you’re having so much trouble?”

He shrugs, rubbing hard circles into his temples. Sighing and soft, MacKenzie presses in from behind him—he doesn’t so much as jump, but twitch. Her hands move his out of the way, and her clever fingers work the tension from his head.

Pressing a kiss to his crown, she sighs again. “Whatever you write, I’m sure it’ll be beautiful. Just write something. I don’t want you to regret not speaking at Charlie’s funeral.”

“That’s selfish,” he points out.

Mac hums.

“Of me,” he clarifies. “I should just let his brother…”

There’s a slight sway in the way she’s standing, her weight shifting between her feet. Time has waned into the small hours of the morning, and they might be in bed if they weren’t due to bury their best friend in the hours to come.

Capturing her hand, he hides his mouth in her palm.

Her arms, winding tight around his neck, reveal him again.

“All mourning is selfish, I think.” His cheek rubs against the sleeve of her terrycloth robe, and he listens to her voice turn peculiar—hard, but still yielding. “But you’re not taking anything from Charlie. It’s the last thing you’ll be able to give to him, a final word for what he didn’t have time to say to the people he never got to meet. Although I suppose with Charlie, it’s more of a last laugh.” Her breath is at his ear, and for a moment she is the hot desert air and unremarkable memorial services conducted on forlorn outposts at the end of the horizon. “There’s nothing worse than missing an opportunity that might have proved how much you love someone.”

( _Glory, glory, what a helluva way to die_ , the Marines sang.

Flags folded into careful angles and triangles, scorched bodies descending into the Earth. And thousands of miles away, MacKenzie and comrades drinking rotgut under the wide pale moon, toasting fallen soldiers and lost friends.)

Without prompting, any guilt he’s been holding onto for not attending his father’s funeral dissolves off his shoulders.

Turning his head, Will hides a kiss in the crook of her elbow. He closes his eyes, clutching to her arm. “I can’t do this. I need more than three days to be able to do this.”

He counts the nights he spent writing her absence into permanence, the nights where cigarette after cigarette burned down until they singed his knuckles.

“It took me three years to write yours.”

Mac pulls away, but he pulls her into his lap.

 

 

 

They finish their last broadcast of _News Night_ and half-certain that he sealing her into a fate of unquestioned doom, he hands MacKenzie her obituary.  

Inside her, lives their unborn child.

Will decides he ought to be less concerned with death.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
